Our expert team of archaeoludologists has pored over the historical record, piecing together and translating ancient artifacts. We are pleased to finally be able to present a scientifically-accurate reconstruction of one of the very first forms of electronic entertainment, in a playable form for the first time this millennium: SPACEOUT COMBREAK VADERMAND!

On a less absurdly counterfactual note, this game is a classic example of what happens when my game-designer instincts seize upon a goofy “what if” premise and run with it. In this case, “what if someone came across a description of several classic arcade games, mistook them for a single game, and tried to make a game that fit that description?” Something like a round of Telephone as applied to game mechanics, I suppose. Anyway, you should probably just try it and see what I mean. Go play Spaceout!

Game 05: Spaceout Combreak Vadermand: a Historical Reconstruction, 4.7 out of 5 based on 7 ratings

7 Comments:

I love it.
As I love all your other games. There is always just the bit of experiment needed to be a great fun.
I wrote a review ( in french ) on my blog on this one and some others : http://oujevipo.over-blog.fr/

I keep coming back to this game; it’s just so fun! My highest score so far is 280k, in the first stage with the white guys (the farthest I can get).

Once I beat a few levels by giving up on being careful, not clicking ever, and just trying to get really high time bonuses for a new city every level — I’d lose my last city every level, but earn one. But that actually stopped working pretty quickly; even on the higher levels I wasn’t actually earning 50k each time.

But yeah, this game is in my bookmarks and I keep habitually clicking to it when I get bored. I’d say that’s a mark of a successful game!

The competing strategies here are definitely carefulness and destructive chaos. I’m thinking, “I should really click, I’m going to let one of these past” but another part of me says, “no, I can get all of these, wait on the clicking!”

If you let a large mass of missiles build up on the screen, the invaders are gone in no time, giving you a huge time bonus — but that’s also the quickest way to lose your cities. However, if you keep the missile count low, you can actually pay some attention to aiming, which will also get you through the level quickly. Being good at the former strategy will come in handy in the later levels when a constant rain of missiles happens whether you want it to or not. The latter skill is needed to pick off the last few enemies on every level. So I guess you need to improve at both, and still know when to slow things down and detonate the missiles.

I actually made it to wave 18 just now, with 520k points. I got through most of the really hard levels thanks to winning a new city just in time, but I actually managed to keep one protected in level 16 (which is good, because I didn’t win one that round).

It’s been a long time since I played missile command, so I’m not sure if this is intended behavoir:

I thought I had a backlog of three spare cities built up (Next City 5000, points 16000). But when I lost only a single city, at the end of the level it said “5000 points – new city” multiple times, and the “next city” went all the way up to 20000. I was very sad!

In other news, Grim is inhumanly good at this. In still other news, I finally tried this out with an actual mouse instead of a trackpad — so much better!